THE earliest surviving love letter written by Dylan Thomas to his future wife fetched more than £12,000 at auction last night.

It was among a collection of his work that sold for more than £60,000 in total.

The poet's letter to Caitlin Macnamara was sold for $22,800 (£12,400), including buyer's premium - nearly four times its estimated value.

It was sent to Caitlin when she was recovering from an illness in a London hospital in 1936, shortly after the couple first met.

Other items which went under the hammer yesterday, at Sotheby's in New York, included a first edition of Thomas's first book, 18 Poems, which he gave to Caitlin. The book, inscribed "From Dylan to Caitlin. Lovingly - in spite", fetched $38,400 (£20,900), said aSotheby's spokeswoman.

In his love letter, Thomas writes, "Tell me everything; when you'll be out again, where you'll be at Christmas, and that you think of me and love me.

"And when you're in the world again, we'll both be useful if you like, trot round, do things, compromise with the They people, find a place with a bath and no bugs in Bloomsbury, and be happy there."

Thomas adds later, "I love you so much I'll never be able to tell you; I'm frightened to tell you."

Another love letter, dated May 1937, shortly before the couple married, was sold for $18,000 (£9,800) yesterday.

Thomas's passion here is even more apparent as he tells Caitlin, "... it's nonsense me living without you, you without me: the world is very unbalanced unless; in the very centre of it, we ... stand together all the time in a hairy, golden, more-or-less unintelligible haze of daftness ..."

A hand-written manuscript of Fern Hill, probably Thomas's most famous poem, fetched $37,200 (£20,200) - more than double its estimate value.

All prices included the buyer's premium, and most of the lots were sold to private collectors, Sotheby's said.

The lots were part of a set acquired by private collector Maurice Neville, who said he had collected "authors and titles I liked" over 20 years - with a particular passion for association copies of books with compelling inscriptions.

A Sotheby's spokeswoman said, "This auction represented the finest collection of modern literature to appear on the market since Sotheby's sale of the Jonathan Goodwin Collection in 1977.

"Indeed many of its treasures were purchased by Mr Neville at that sale."